Nicholas Capaldi

Corporate social responsibility and the bottom line

Purpose – To clarify the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and profits. Design/methodology/approach – Explicates CSR against the background of a larger thesis (Coase) about the role of firms in a market economy. Findings – There are three different senses of CSR: negative – what not to do (illegal); positive – innovative products and services; and supplementary. There is a clear hierarchy or prioritization here: negative > positive > supplementary. Practical implications – There are four areas in which supplementary obligations contribute directly to the bottom line: the environment, marketing, recruitment, and international. Originality/value – This paper overcomes false dualisms between CSR and profits, avoids hidden political agendas, and offers persuasive arguments for firms to engage in relevant CSR activity.

A Catholic Perspective on Organ Sales

In this article, I address the issue of the sale of human organs and the moral implications of a market in human organs under the aegis of Christian Bioethics. I argue that moral issues of this kind cannot be adequately be addressed from the point of view of moral frameworks, which point exclusively to procedural norms. Rather, a moral perspective must embody some substantive norms derived from a particular content-full moral or theological perspective. This substantive norms to which I appeal in this article are those of Roman Catholicism. The most important sources cited include the works of Pius XIi (1956) and the works of John Paul II (1985 and 1991). The conclusion reached is that not only is it morally permissible for Catholics to participate in a market in organ sales but it may also be prudent public policy.

Liberty in Hume’s History of England

On Reading Humes History of Liberty.- Humes England as a Natural History of Morals.- Hume on Liberty in the Successive English Constitutions.- Humes Historical Conception of Liberty.- Humes History and the Parameters of Economic Development.- The Preservation of Liberty.

The Ethics and Economics of Health Care

This essay argues that medical innovation proceeds most efficiently and effectively within a free market economy. Medical innovation is an expression of the technological project: the program through which we seek to control nature, to improve the quality and quantity of life. The Technological Project proceeds most efficiently with a free market economy because such a market both promotes competition and encourages innovation. As I argue, the market is a discovery process in which alternatives are tried, tested, and selected by consumers choices. The alternatives to a free market-primarily central planning and a heavily regulated market-fail adequately to encourage medical innovation.

Analytic Philosophy And Language

The manner in which analytic philosophers have approached language reflects a particular epistemological agenda.1 Analytic philosophy is committed to a modern naturalist2 epistemology. Such an epistemology has a recurrent problem: to explain how, if knowledge is to be understood as the internal grasping of a wholly objective external structure (form), it is possible for a subject to abstract within experience the form of an object. The reason why this is a problem is that all modern attempts so far to explain the abstraction process as itself a natural (mechanistic) process have failed. Moreover, many attempts to explain the process seem to raise the specter of a subject (or human culture) that structures experience to such an extent that knowledge can no longer be understood as the internal mirroring of a wholly objective external form. In short, there are two things that modern naturalist epistemology has difficulty accomplishing: (a) presenting knowledge as itself a wholly natural process (thereby making its epistemology consistent and coherent with its metaphysics) 3 and (b) avoiding appeal to a subject of any kind.4

What’s Wrong with Solidarity?

The concept of solidarity is both a descriptive and a normative concept. It purports to describe the network of communal relationships from which we derive and that define who we are. It purports, as well, to prescribe our moral and political obligations to that network of communal relationships. We assert five theses with regard to solidarity.

The Role of the Business Ethicist

The place of contemporary commerce within human experience is intertwined with the Technological Project (TP), the attempt of the Scientific Revolution to master and possess nature. The TP works best within the framework of the modern free market, which encourages competition and innovation. A free market economy requires a government characterized by the rule of law, which acts as a constraint on government and which safeguards the freedom of autonomous persons. This historically-based and non-technical account of the place of the political economy within human experience is attested in the works of major philosophers, and has the further advantage of not being based on the understanding of hidden and timeless laws. Nevertheless, Business Ethics is currently dominated by a scientism that views commerce according to a-historical and objective norms discovered through various competing sciences in which theory precedes practice. However, the role of Business Ethics is not to say in advance what ought to be the case and then to re-fashion practice accordingly, but rather to explicate what is actually the case, and thus to make explicit the underlying and contingent norms from historically attested phenomena. Such an approach to Business Ethics is firmly rooted in the philosophical and humanistic traditions, and escapes the dangers of ideological generalization inherent in today’s democratic socialism.

The Copernican Revolution in Hume and Kant

It is impossible to understand modern philosophy without considering the scientific revolution. Even after one admits the medieval root of this revolution, it remains the case that a radical reorientation in Western thinking was introduced by Copernicus, developed by Galileo and Descartes, and philosophically explicated by Hume and Kant. My general purpose is to show how Copernicus was a common influence on Hume and Kant. My specific purpose is to show to what extent both Hume and Kant were revolutionary and to what extent they failed to complete the revolution.

Metaphysics In Analytic Philosophy

In Chapter One, we identified the metaphysics of the Enlightenment Project as a modern truncated form of Aristotelianism. The purpose of this chapter is (1) to elaborate upon our identification of that metaphysics as a modern and truncated form of Aristotelianism, (2) to show how much of analytic philosophy is informed by the metaphysics of the Enlightenment Project, (3) to argue that the only coherent form of “modern” Aristotelian metaphysics is Hegel’s,1 and (4) to show that although analytic philosophy is by virtue of its embrace of the Enlightenment Project opposed to Hegelianism, analytic metaphysics is often and inevitably driven in its pursuit of coherence and comprehensiveness in the direction of Hegelianism. What emerges in the metaphysics of analytic philosophy is a constant and unresolved tension between what it wishes to say and what its pursuit of coherence forces it to say.2

Scientism, deconstruction, and nihilism

I show how scientism leads to deconstruction and both, in turn, lead to nihilism. Nihilism constitutes a denial both of the existence of fallacious moral reasoning and the existence of a moral dimension to fallacious reasoning. I argue against all of these positions by maintaining that (1) there is a pre-theoretical framework of norms within which technical thinking function, (2) the pre-theoretical framework cannot itself be technically conceptualized, and (3) the explication of this framework permits us to identify both fallacies of moral reasoning and the immorality of fallacious reasoning.